CA Technologies’ cloud-based enterprise mobility management (EMM) suite added support for Apple iOS 8, even before the new phones hit the shelves. This update to CA Management Cloud for Mobility means BYOD programs can immediately manage and secure just-released Apple iPhone 6 devices, as well as the content, apps and email that run on them. IDN explores CA’s vision for enterprise mobility with Arun Bhattacharya, CA senior director for Enterprise Mobility.

"CA can provide full management out-of-the-box, for not only the [iPhone 6] devices, but apps, content and email."

CA Technologies’ cloud-based enterprise mobility management (EMM) suite added support for Apple iOS 8, even before the new phones hit the shelves. This update to CA Management Cloud for Mobility means BYOD programs can immediately manage and secure just-released Apple iPhone 6 devices, as well as the content, apps and email that run on them.

“By launching ‘zero-day’ support for Apple iOS 8 we are demonstrating CA’s approach to end-to-end enterprise mobility management offers flexibility and time savings – to both end users and IT managers,” Bhattacharya told IDN. “Without significant complexity or delays, CA can provide full management out-of-the-box, for not only the [Apple] devices, but apps, content and email.”

To understand how CA is able to manage and secure Apple’s latest iOS so quickly and completely, it is worth looking at CA’s enterprise mobility efforts, which begun in earnest early this year.

CA first publically rolled out its vison and products for a comprehensive lifecycle approach to enterprise mobility at Mobile World Congress in February. The CA Management Cloud for Mobility portfolio is delivered as a cloud service, with capabilities to help enterprises design, launch, manage and secure mobile resources.

“Our view is that IT should not have to deal with silos to deliver mobility. Mobility should be treated as an extension of your overall enterprise,” Bhattacharya told IDN. With CA Management Cloud for Mobility, CA is tapping into, and integrating with, long-standing expertise in application performance management, dev/ops, security and management for traditional enterprise apps, he added. “In this way, we let IT break down the silos between mobile [projects] and the rest of the enterprise, and at the same time provide them a unified view of their entire enterprise, including mobility, through a single pane of glass,” Bhattacharya said.

CA approach to EMM is designed to offer scalable, integrated and consistent management, security and compliance – without disrupting performance. To deliver on this balance, CA’s EMM suite focuses on four crucial points in the mobile enterprise – devices, apps, content and email. This modular approach is powered by Smart Containerization, which dynamically controls mobile assets using a set of patent-pending intelligent container technologies.

CA Mobile Device Management (CA MDM) provides a comprehensive policy framework for enrolling, configuring and onboarding enterprise apps. Features are designed to provide IT unified management for all enterprise devices – mobile, laptops and desktops. To promote this “unified view” of all enterprise devices, CA offers out-of-the-box support for Exchange, Active Directory and certification authority, Bhattacharya added.

Beyond CA MDM’s ability to let IT provision, secure and manage mobile devices, it also can deploy mobile apps (automatically or using an app store). It also offers device configuration management, which provides policy-based enrollment of thousands of BYOD devices.

CA Mobile Application Management (CA MAM) secures, manages and controls mobile apps across the enterprise and cloud, providing IT with fine-grained access control policies. Designed to complement CA MDM, CA MAM lets IT admins define more detailed access criteria for mobile apps, and gain deeper control over distribution of both internal and third-party apps. CA MAM automatically enforces user authentication, ensuring employees only have access to apps they need based on roles and access levels. In specific, CA MAM offers role-based app management, geo-fencing, time-fencing, network-fencing, single sign-on and app authentication. Thanks in part to a powerful app wrapping feature, CA MAM provides enterprises more fine-grained policy enforcement – without the need to undertake complex custom coding. It also captures analytics for reports on app usage by user, device or group.

CA MAM looks to strike a balance often lacking in BYOD, Bhattacharya said, between the needs of the enterprise and those of the mobile end user. “We can provide the enterprises the management they need for their sensitive apps and data – and not require the end user to give up control over their device,” he added.

CA Mobile Content Management (CA MCM) enables secure content access and collaboration through file synchronization. It works with on-premises enterprise content repositories and cloud-based stores. This provides the ability to search for content across network file systems, cloud-based repositories and enterprise storage solutions with a single query.

For performance and security, content is never routed through CA MCM servers but accessed directly from the sources to the enterprise users’ devices. That said, CA MCM helps enforce policies for data encryption and removal. Authorized users can get ever faster searches across all these diverse locations thanks to CA’s use of metadata for such queries, according to Bhattacharya.

CA’s Smart Containerization also plays a crucial role with content management. The technology can dynamically apply context-driven content access and collaboration policies on the device – even at an individual document level. “The ‘Smart Container’ will enforces policies appropriate to content as required by the situation,” such as type of email, location and so forth, he added, and shared couple of examples: A mobile app may not be allowed to access certain data, based on a location or use of a public Wi-Fi connection; or an email may (or may not) need to have encryption applied before it is sent, based on the address or the content. “If I’m just emailing someone to say “hello,’ for example, the smart container will know that – and MCM won’t encrypt it,” Bhattacharya said.

CA MCM also provides real-time notification of activities by users on content or by the system on actions taken by users. Admins can also specify mobile content storage policies (e.g. offline encrypted with sync, online only and offline clear with sync).

CA included features to prevent email access from unmanaged or non-compliant devices, as well as to protect confidential data within the mobile inbox. In specific, CA MEM automatically encrypts content and lets IT define and enforce policies. It works with iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Outlook and Webmail; and support for public email addresses from Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail. It also lets users employ the same secure credential for email, enterprise apps and VPN.

Taking secure collaboration to a high level, CA MEM can revoke individual email access – even after the email has been delivered. Further, CA MEM can enable/disable reply, reply all and forward actions. It provides on-device, desk-level encryption for iOS and Android, preventing malicious users from reading email content, even from a SIM card that has been removed.

CA’s full suite of EMM offerings are being designed to work seamlessly with CA’s family enterprise management products, including CA SiteMinder and ServiceDesk. “Those integrations are well underway. As we said before, mobility should not be a silo – but an extension of your existing enterprise,” Bhattacharya told IDN.

CA’s vision for integrated mobility extends management. It also embraces a mobile application lifecycle management, or what CA calls “Mobile DevOps.” CA is extending its well-established offerings in API management, gateway access, dev/test and service virtualization to support mobile use cases.

CA described the benefits of its approach to Mobile DevOps this way during February’s MWC. “Working across multiple development tools, languages and methodologies, Mobile DevOps makes it easy to build and test rich API-based mobile applications, gain deep insights into performance, user experience, crash and log analytics, and automate and support these mobile applications when deployed onto millions of devices,” according to a CA statement.

“CA has 30 years of understanding on what concerns enterprises most, security, infrastructure, management and application performance. Add our expertise in Dev/Ops, and we have something special. A way to help companies speed up their mobile lifecycle – and deliver secure and manageable apps much, much faster to their users,” Bhattacharya said.